“Licensing costs have increased drastically, sometimes exceeding tenfold, with mandatory multi-year commitments required for accessing VMware software.”
European cloud providers are suing to annul the EU’s approval of Broadcom’s $61 billion VMware acquisition, citing licensing costs that jumped tenfold with weeks of notice. Broadcom did exactly what everyone predicted it would do. The real story is that the EU Commission rubber-stamped this deal and now an industry group has to go to court to point out the obvious. Reversing a merger approval is nearly impossible, so this is really just leverage for better licensing terms, which Broadcom knows perfectly well.